JJL

This piece is for 's "In Perspective" contest, using stock by .

When I saw the prompt for this contest, my inspiration came immediately from the poem I had just written about my struggle to define identity: [link]

I've moved so many places in the last decade, each location playing a very important role in how I see the world and how I see myself. There are pieces of my behavior that may seem odd to Americans, but would be right at home in India or Japan. And then, one asks, how can I, as a white American woman, really claim to identify with those cultures? Whatever it is I look like on the outside, I have internalized so much more. Everywhere I go, I take some piece of that place with me, and leave some piece of myself behind.

Identity is always shifting, and for me, it's getting harder and harder to define. I don't know where I'm going, really, but I do know where I came from, and that will always be at my core.

The figure was sketched on normal paper, then traced to tissue paper for the final transparent version. The collage portion is sort of a spiral through time of the formation of my identity. The page is not filled yet, because my life isn't filled yet either.

On the whole, I am reasonably happy with this. That pose turned out to be way harder to draw than I originally thought, and I had a pretty limited stack of scraps here to chose from.